LR Adjustment Brush and Detailed Selection

As an example, darkening the sky but keeping the tree branches, hair, etc natural looking foreground objects.....

What settings do you use (brush size, feather amount, etc) to effectively remove a gradient or other modification from these objects?

Or is it best left to CS5?

I usually put the Flow rate pretty high (near or at 100%) for the "cleanup" of unwanted brush strokes, but the brush size and feather amount depend entirely on the area you need to clean up. Generally a pretty small feather amount (single digits) so that you can easily get close to the edges of the subject.

thanks. what does Flow Rate actually do/mean?

Flow and Density work together. Flow sets the density you lay down with a single stroke of the brush and Density sets the maximum density you can reach with successive strokes. So if you have Flow at 25 and Density at 100 you can go over the same area 4 times, each time getting 25% more density until you reach 100%. This way you can build up the mask gradually, having different densities in different parts of it.

And, if you're not already doing so, make sure you're using the "O" button to toggle the tool overlay. That way you can see where you're brushing on your modification, and how dense. in one of the menus (View->Tool Overlay? Maybe?) you can change the color of the overlay - white, red, green. I usually leave mine green, especially when working on skin.

Thank you

nathancarter wrote in post #13519487
you can change the color of the overlay - white, red, green. I usually leave mine green, especially when working on skin.

It's 'shift+O' to cycle through the colour changes.

Thanks, I forgot about that shortcut. O to toggle overlay on/off, Shift+O to cycle overlay colors.

There's also the option to let LR find edges (tick the "Auto mask" box). Might work if the transitions are clear enough.

Rene, do you know of any way to adjust the sensitivity/tolerance of Auto Mask? I couldn't find one. Auto Mask often leaves "splotches" of unmasked bits in the area that I'm trying to mask, so I usually just leave it turned off.

nathancarter wrote in post #13520292
Rene, do you know of any way to adjust the sensitivity/tolerance of Auto Mask? I couldn't find one. Auto Mask often leaves "splotches" of unmasked bits in the area that I'm trying to mask, so I usually just leave it turned off.

Yes, turn up the feathering to the maximum. Or to see the result of a bad auto mask, turn off feathering and try

I don't think it's an absolute though.

A lot of times Auto Mask will give me the equivalent of what "looks like" chromatic abberation. Like a halo effect almost.

Here's another question since I'm already here.....How do you zoom in and out and move around the picture with the Adjustment Brush active? In photoshop it is just H and Z (AltZ).....LR?

Press the space bar to zoom/unzoom.

You can just hit the space bar and then move the cursor around to another section of the image.